mr_trousers

Sorry for vanishing - I've been out of town a couple weeks. Here are the ksp and output logs. I loaded the game up, loaded the craft in question, messed with the reaction wheels a bit and tried to move it around, tried to turn on SAS, then left the game. I'm not stage-locked intentionally - not actually sure what that means. Remotetech is on, and I do have a signal. As I said, I can wrest control away from the reaction wheels to some degree by messing with their settings, so it's not as if it's completely unresponsive, it's just fighting me. It is a career save. I don't have any maneuvers set up, so I'm not sure what it would be trying to point towards if I did have mechjeb somehow trying to take control. Let me know if there's any more information you need - this still has me stumped.

Not sure which log you wanted, here isModuleManager.log and MMPatch.log. I'm also not sure what I could show you in a screenshot, a video may be useful but I'm not sure how to take one of those, you won't exactly see what's happening as I describe it in the op in a still. But here's the craft, if that helps: Mechjeb is installed, but I don't believe there are any mechjeb parts on the ship, unless probe cores come with it automatically. At the least, you can see in the screenshot that mechjeb autopiloting isn't activated or anything.

I guess I'm a little confused how range is calculated, maybe you guys can explain where I'm getting it wrong. I'm using Remote Tech with the root range model activated, and as suggested, turned range of all antennae down to 0.5x. I have a small constellation of 5 relays with Communotron 16s (range 1.25 Mm) in a pentagon around Kerbin at 1.2Mm orbital altitude. I put another satellite in a polar orbit with a Communotron 16, so it can communicate with the constellation around Kerbin, and then a Reflectron KR-7 (range 45 Mm) pointed at the Mun. I then sent out a probe to orbit the Mun, also equipped with a Communotron 16 (just for maneuvers near Kerbin) and a Reflectron Kr-7, which once I got underway I pointed back at Kerbin. The Mun is at 11.4 Mm from Kerbin, so my probe should lose connection with the pentagon contellation of omnidirectional antennae satellites at around 8.75 Mm away from Kerbin - that's given by min(45,1.25)+sqrt(45*1.25), which should be the range the Communotron 16 and Reflectron KR-7 can communicate. The probe's only connection should be with the polar orbit satellite that also has a Reflectron KR-7. But what I'm seeing is that even in orbit around the moon way out at 11.4 Mm, well past the limit of 8.75 Mm, it's still communicating with all of the omnidirectional-only satellites as well. How could that be?

No idea what's going on here, but my latest probe seems to have its mind made up of where it wants to be pointing and won't take no for an answer. The probe is equipped with: A dish antenna and an omni antenna from Remote Tech (Reflektron KR-7 and Communotron 16) SCANSat Radar array DMagic's magnetometer boom Probodobodyne OKTO probe core Small inline reaction wheel Two OX-4W 3x2 solar panels A Universal Storage core with four fuel tanks strapped to it, plus a couple other fuel tanks total 48-75 "Spark" LF Engine A handful of batteries And that's it. Everything was normal for the beginning of the launch, I was headed to Minmus to do an altimetry scan. Once pretty far out there, it started acting strangely. I can't activate SAS, for starters - when I press T, it flashes on for the briefest moment before being shut off again. I can't use the reaction wheels to change the direction of the probe at all. It seems like it's fixed on one point and won't give me control. I've managed to get it to move by right clicking on the probe core and the reaction wheel and messing around with the reaction wheel setting - changing it from "Normal" to "Pilot Only" and one to "SAS Only" seems to allow me to change where it's pointing, but within a few seconds of me moving it, it starts trying to take back control and move it back to where it wants it pointed. I managed to keep it mostly under control by turning the reaction wheel power way down, but then when I activated my engine for my burn, it used the engine's gimbal to try to move it to where it wanted it to be pointed as well, ignoring my input and the fact I was trying to point at a maneuver node. It's like I'm fighting against another pilot in the ship. And even though I can wrest some control away, when I change the settings of the wheel back to "Normal" it immediately snaps back to where it wants to be pointed and I can't move it at all. Any ideas?

Thanks for the explanation. Honestly it seems pretty crazy that they would load all textures at start up instead of on demand. Are the problems that fixes so considerable? It seems hugely inefficient. You're surely right that many people will now just be butting up against the new part count and ram barriers, but even so, the fact that much larger ships and much more heavily modded games *can* be supported are still great improvements to the game which greatly improve its quality. The game is still better, even if people will find new limits!

I guess I don't really know how all of this works in the first place, but I'm just confused. It seems that parts especially, and their textures, are the main memory hogs for KSP. But it seems to me that many games, especially modern ones, have just as many assets, and just as many textures, and furthermore these textures are generally in higher resolution than in KSP, and all of these run just fine without taking up crazy amounts of memory. What is it about KSP/a modded KSP game that is different that requires such greater of a load? It's not really important and I'm not mad about it or anything, but I am confused and I'm just legitimately curious about this, haha.

I'm not sure if this is the right place for this, but I would really appreciate a feature that allows you to save or favorite a mod - without installing it. Just add it to a list so you can check back later. There are several mods I think are really cool but that I'm maybe not quite ready to install yet, and I will probably forget what a lot of them are! I'll probably have to make a text document of them or something. It would just really be convenient to be able to star them on CKAN or something like that. Either way, thanks very much for this tool, it is absolutely essential for modding KSP at this point. Thank you!

Wow, this is very cool. This is exactly what I probably need for end-game journeys to other solar systems in RSS (with RSS Extrasolar). There's definitely no way to pack enough life support for several light-year distant planets! Thanks so much.

Right, it's also literally in the thread title too though. Only a 1.0.5 version is out, there's no guarantee it would work on anything past that.

As far as I'm aware both of these are completely normal in stock KSP career. You have to upgrade your VAB to get access to action groups, and your mission control to be able to take more than two contracts at once.

Wow, thank you for this mod. This is exactly what I was looking for. There's so much more to our solar system than just the eight planets, this mod really helps to bring to life the complexity and great number of bodies floating around our sun. Thanks!

Brilliant. So it's a time of day thing, rather than a time of year thing. Thank you. It looks like MechJeb has a similar functionality which shows inclination to orbit. Thanks much for the video. Your series looks very interesting, I'll probably reference it in the future when I'm having difficulty - though I'm not using RO, just many (most) of the mods which it requires/recommends/suggests. I quite like your mission log, I wish I had had the foresight to record that information for my launches. A quick question - hopefully not too much a derailment of this thread: I can't find a full list of the mods you're using here, but it's not simply RO/RP-0, is it? Specifically, I'm very curious what mod you're using that gives you a full list of science opportunities.

Okay, what I've done now is activating my main engine at the same time as the boosters and just keeping throttle very low, so I can still use its gimbal for steering while not consuming much of that stage's fuel. Also trying out the ascent profile as you've described, I think things are going pretty well. New just general question for anyone: so I understand that getting into an orbit with inclination less than the latitude of your launch site isn't very easy (though I don't know how to correct for it). But anyway, reading this, I looked up the angle of the moon's orbit and saw that, it being near the ecliptic, it was actually pretty close to the latitude of Cape Canaveral. So I assumed I'd be pretty good for orbits for getting to the moon/the ecliptic in general from those launch sites. But actually, when I achieved orbit, it appeared that I'd been terribly wrong; the moon was in a plane probably some 50 degrees off from mine. Perhaps my assumption would have been correct, had I launched at a different time of year or from a different longitude, like from China maybe. I've tried doing some googling to find out how missions to the moon did their launch to orbit but I've had difficulty finding specifics. This whole tilted Earth thing is proving quite a challenge to my limited knowledge. Anyone have any suggestions/information/resources? I couldn't find anything in the RSS wiki, so I hope this isn't an already explained question.

Good to hear! ASE is exactly the sort of thing I'd like to have in my game, I'd definitely love to see an updated version of it in the future. Thanks for your hard work!

This mod is great, thanks a lot. I really appreciate the RemoteTech integration with probes, where the probe won't make sound if there's no connection. Now that I've finally started manned missions, though, I've noted that the RT integration doesn't extend that far - even if you have no antenna on your craft, your pilot will still talk back and forth with launch control. This seems a bit odd, honestly. Is it intentional? Is there any way to make it so a manned ship with no radio connection will, too, have to sit in silence?

Hmm, okay. I remained vertical mostly due to minimal steering capabilities in the solid rocket booster stages, and also fears that separation of those boosters while pitched over would result in them impacting the rest of the ship. I can see why that might lead to the efficiency loss though, thanks! I'll try to come up with something better in later iterations.

I finally made it to orbit! Here's an album! Damn, that wasn't easy. I'm not using the full RO build (Real Fuels is way out of my comfort zone), but I'm using most of it. With KCT, I had to to a lot of simulations before I finally got this thing into orbit, and then finally the real go. Which I still had to redo a couple times. And all that with only a little more than 100 m/s dv to spare, for a 0.6 ton payload. Wow. My mechjeb readout in the VAB gave me about 10k delta-v, so I'm really wondering where it all went. It's much cooler to be actually playing with Earth and the real difficulty that entails rather than Kerbin. Anyway, just thought I'd share. If anyone sees anything I could improve on from those screenshots or just has some general tips I'd love to hear, that was damn hard to pull off, I can't imagine trying to get real payloads up!

I know several bodies were added relatively recently, but are there any plans to add more? I'd love to see the five large moons of Uranus, and definitely Ceres (and maybe even a couple of the other dwarf planets?). No real rush, there's plenty to explore as is, just curious. If there's absolutely no plan to do this at all, would it be extremely difficult to add them myself?

I'm also having a problem with fuel tank capacity... No tanks, stock or otherwise, have their capacities change when I scale them. I installed TweakScale on CKAN, and I just tried reinstalling but the problem persists. Any ideas? Edit: Whoops, I had modular fuel tanks installed and I didn't even realize. My bad.

Hm! Those look very promising. I will absolutely give (probably, because I don't have much room before the memory limit left) SimpleConstruction a shot. Thanks a lot!

Thanks! I've never used those, but if I can't find any way to build it manually in-game I'll probably have to use one of those. Yeah, the plan is to build at a ground station at each of the Deep Space Network sites with several very large dish antennae. That 70 meter one would probably be the largest at any of them. My preferred way would be to transport the materials needed and build them with KIS, but I'm pretty sure we're talking way too large of objects for that. Oh well, haha. Nice! That worked handily. My 70m dish now reads a range of 140 trillion meters, which is exactly what I expected for that size. Funny thing is happening though - everything's all good when I "launch" from the VAB and have its little construct sitting on the launch pad. But if I go back to the space center and then reload, the dish disappears - but not any of the other big pieces. It is probably a tweakscale problem, so I'll be off to ask in that thread about it. Thank you very much for your help though.

I'm trying to make it so that the two big dish antennae have modifiable sizes via TweakScale, so that you still have the original two antennae, to use in times when those two are appropriate, but then when you need more range can scale them up to larger sizes and in so doing also increase their range. So a CommTech-1 might have a variable range of anywhere from its normal 350M km at its normal size, to 140G km if you scaled it up to 70 meters in diameter. I've figured out how to make the size increasable, I've just not figured out how to do the same for range and other properties.

Okay, I successfully added Tweakscale sizing to the two big dishes... Here's the CommTech-1 in 70m form, and with a Mark 2-1 Command Pod in its shadow down there for scale. I've never done any modding before but that was fairly simple after examining various TweakScale and RT files. Happily, TweakScale seems by default to scale the mass of the dishes. Making it also affect the other properties - most importantly, the range - is something which seems far less transparent and which I'm not having as much luck figuring out how to do. Especially seeing as I can't easily check the new range in the VAB, I'm not even sure how I would test it if I did figure it out. Any help would be appreciated! Edit: Here it is sitting on the launch pad. I have no idea how I'm going to transport this thing... I don't think you can put tweakscaled objects in KIS containers. But I will find a way!

Very cool. I'll be keeping an eye on this.

I'm not using RO (Real Fuels is honestly too much added complexity for me at the moment), only RSS - it does, however, come with the same ground station config (and thus the Deep Space Network). Additionally, I think I probably already changed my RT settings to something pretty similar to RO - I activated Root mode anyway, which I think is much more interesting than Standard (and yes, very helpful when it comes to RSS). There are two problems with this solution, as I see it, and thus my post above. The first is that, for a couple reasons, I don't like the Deep Space Network ground station approach. For one, in a stock solar system game with RT, you have to put a great deal of work into building a communications network over Kerbin in the first place to bounce the not-too-impressive signal of the KSC to everywhere you need it in space reliably. With the three DSN ground stations in RSS, this problem (and thus, challenge, and fun value) is greatly reduced, if not outright eliminated. Secondly, the game nominally starts at the beginning of 1951 in RSS, a time when the space program was indeed in its infancy and the Deep Space Network stations were not even built. For both of these reasons, I would very much like to instead have the ability to build, essentially, the Deep Space Network stations myself, in game, and remove the ground stations from the config. The only thing I'm missing is the ability to build a big enough dish. The second problem is just that with the huge distances in RSS, even the ground stations and the root model aren't always sufficient for all of the purposes you need. It would just be useful to be able to build some properly more powerful antennae. I could just increase the range modifier by several times, but in my opinion, this would fairly upset the balance and difficulty curve of the existing antennae and I'd prefer not to. All in all, to me the best option really just seems to be able to increase the size of at least one of the dishes.